Black Fire
by ScumFreezebag
Summary: The bullet went through Tsuna's forehead as Gokudera watched the black flames rise. DISCONTINUED
1. Chapter 1

Gokudera pressed harder against the Tenth's chest. The blood was flowing a bit slower now, but Gokudera didn't know whether that was from his first aid or from him just starting to _run out of blood_, because he'd always thought no-one could bleed that much and live.

Gokudera tried to focus on the rise and fall of the Tenth's chest, on his boss's still-alive unfocused eyes. Tried not to think of Yamamoto probably being dead by now, that idiot. Tried not to to think of how the Tenth had taken those bullets for _him_ and was fading away now in a pool of his own blood.

Then he saw black flames and heard that _bastard's _laughter and knew that he hadn't hidden well enough, that they'd been found. Gokudera felt a syringe in his neck and a wave of irresistible exhaustion start pulling him into unconsciousness. He tried to cling to the Tenth, but a brutal slash of pain struck his hand, forcing him to let go. The Tenth fell out of his hands and Gokudera slipped to the ground, trying desperately to stay awake.

The last thing he saw before darkness took him was a gun being placed directly on the Tenth's forehead.

The last thing he heard was a gunshot.


	2. Chapter 2

Yamamoto woke up on a hard, uncomfortable cot in a small concrete room. For a single, blissful moment, he was unsure of where he was or what was happening.

Then he remembered. He was in Italy, somewhere near the Varia base. They had completely failed in their mission. And Tsuna was…

"Tsuna!" He yelled suddenly. He looked around the room desperately, tried to get up out of the cot, and then fell back, too weak to stand.

"You shouldn't move." Someone said quietly from just inside the door, their face hidden. Yamamoto recognised their voice, though he'd never heard them speak so softly before.

"Squ- Squalo?" Yamamoto stuttered out. "You- we thought- well, we assumed"

"Yeah, can it, kid. I'm here now. You're in one of our backup bases, about 10 miles from our main one. Me 'n Lussuria found you facedown in the woods. He was barely able to keep you alive, with all the blood you'd lost."

"What about the rest of my friends? Tsuna was hurt really badly, we were trying to get him out… I mean, if you found me, you must've…" Yamamoto stared hopefully at Squalo, an edge of his regular smile on his face.

"We have your storm guardian here, he should still be sleeping. His injuries weren't too serious."

"What about Tsuna?"

"We're unsure about where the rest of your team ended up."

"Where's Tsuna? You have to have gotten him out…"

"Oh, and here's your sword." Squalo gently placed Shigure Kintoki on the side of Yamamoto's cot.

"Tsuna. Where."

Squalo inhaled deeply, shuddered out a sigh. "Yamamoto… your boss is dead."

"What? No, there's no way, he has to be… you're… no, no way."

"Mammon confirmed it. He had a projection of himself nearby when it happened."

Yamamoto's face fell slack. There was a heavy roaring noise in his ears and his thoughts were buzzing desperately in his skull, trying to make it all a lie, a dream, a misunderstanding. Anything but what it was.

"How did it happen?" Yamamoto choked out.

"Bullet to the brain, on top of his other injuries. It was that guy with the weird flames." Squalo's face contorted with anger as he thought about the killer. "It was that _fucker_ again. How many of us is he going to-"

"-Can you leave for a minute, Squalo?"

"Don't do something stupid. Look, I don't even know what happened to Xanxus, but there's still things for me to do… We need fighters at your level, Yamamoto."

"I need a minute Squalo. Please."

Squalo glared suspiciously at Yamamoto before leaving the room, but didn't stop to listen at the door once he left, walking away without turning back.

A few seconds later, he was sprinting back to Yamamoto's room. Blue flames burst from the door. The sound of rocks shattering and metal screeching almost covered the strange animal noises coming from inside the room, something that at first sounded like sobbing but by the end was almost hysterical laughter.

The flames and the noise stopped abruptly. Squalo stood, shocked, in the doorway, seeing the completely trashed room. It looked like a bomb had gone off; its concrete walls were shattered, the metal supports underneath exposed. All the furniture was completely shredded.

Yamamoto stood calmly holding his sword in the center of this destruction. Tears were falling silently down his cheeks, but he was smiling gently. If it weren't for his empty eyes, it would have seemed like a normal, happy expression.

Squalo almost jumped when Yamamoto spoke. That smile was something else; it took a hell of a lot to make Squalo nervous.

"Take me to Gokudera. Please. We have a lot to do."

Squalo nodded mutely, and Yamamoto smiled a little more brightly.

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><p><strong>Tee hee hee, I am so mysterious. Thank-you those who reviewed, you guys are the best.<strong>


	3. Chapter 3

**Sorry for the long update lag! My computer is officially dead. Boohoo, goodbye fallen silicon comrade. I also probably won't be updating again until I get access to a new one (I am currently sneakily typing in my mom's office at the dead of night) and can set up a bit of a backlog.**

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><p>When Gokudera woke up, the was no denial. Only shock.<p>

The Tenth was dead. He had failed.

He couldn't really understand what he was feeling yet, the waiting to bust his mental barriers and shatter him once the shock faded. He tried, desperately, to keep his thoughts foggy, to cling to the edges of drug-induced slumber and incomprehension.

All too quickly, the barriers failed, and his reality set in.

Gokudera's stomach clenched too tight, so tight it hurt. A strange lump built up in his chest, restricting his breathing and making his heart beat way too hard, a painful beat-beat, beat-beat that was pushing his body apart from the inside. He wanted to cry, scream, howl, do anything to relieve the pressure in his chest, but his throat was constricting his voice and his eyes, somehow, stayed dry.

He eventually became aware of himself, curled up in a ball in a hospital-style cot. He was gasping desperately, hysterically, for breath. There was a sharp, harsh, throbbing pain coming from his right hand as he clutched desperately at his own chest.

Somehow his eyes were still dry.

Gokudera looked fuzzily at his right hand, noticing it was bandaged. He tried to move his fingers and found that only his thumb twitched weakly. The rest of his hand was unresponsive, no matter how desperately he tried to move it.

He felt that it should bother him more, his hand not obeying him, but it was impossible to focus on it over the other loss that was crushing his chest.

He didn't know how long he lay there for, curled up in a ball, gasping for air, before Yamamoto came into the room and stood over the bed.

"Get up, Gokudera. We have work to do."

"He's... dead, Yamamoto. Dead. Dead. Dead dead dead dead dead dead..." Gokudera mumbled under his breath.

He was shocked when Yamamoto lifted him up by the collar, started shaking him, and then continued talking to him as he hung like a rag doll.

"I know that he's dead, Gokudera. I also know that the man who killed him is still very alive and well at this moment. So snap out of it, now, or I will have to kill him without you." Yamamoto emphasized each sentence by lifting Gokudera higher in the air until his feet no longer touched the ground and he could barely breathe.

"I failed him, Yamamoto. I failed him and he's dead and how... why... why why why why why why why WHY?"

Yamamoto slammed Gokudera into the wall, hard, before carefully lowering him down onto the cot. Yamamoto blinked, and stared at his own hands, seeming surprised by the violent treatment they had just given his friend.

"You know something?" Yamamoto said gently. "I never thought either of us were good enough to be his right hand man."

"I thought I would get there someday." Gokudera mumbled.

"I always thought that together, we'd be enough. Two incomplete parts making a better whole." Yamamoto replied. "I guess we were both wrong."

"Now, get up." Yamamoto said. "We have a lot to do."

Gokudera stared at Yamamoto, at the silent tears that were falling down his cheeks.

He got up. His eyes were still dry.

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><p><strong>Next chapter, explanations. Also Hibari.<strong>


	4. Chapter 4

Gokudera and Yamamoto walked in silence for a long time. Gokudera looked numbly at the walls around him, seeing a strange mix of old worn bricks and reinforced steel and concrete. He looked out the window and saw sun and leaves, and for half a second felt relief, a little hope. Grief and guilt quickly slammed back down on his thoughts.

Eventually the two of them reached a small room set up like a boardroom. The people inside stopped their loud argument to observe at the new arrivals.

Squalo stared at Yamamoto's face, passively cheerful and almost normal. The other occupants of the room, Bel, Lussuria, and Mammon, however, seemed either too nervous or uncaring to make eye contact.

Yamamoto was the first to break the silence.

"Where are we? Is this it? Just the four of you? Where's the rest of your team? And our team?"

Squalo quietly responded "We're in a modified church, a secret secondary base near our main one I had built in case of attack. Yes, this is it. . I don't know how many you brought, but Mammon confirmed that three members of your team, including the Arcobaleno, were trapped in an artificial landslide at the back of the facility. The rest of Varia didn't get out."

Belphegor laughed openly at the silence that followed Squalo's explanation.

Yamamoto continued, still calm. "What happened? How did they manage to take over your main headquarters?"

"You talk first, kid. The three of us have been in our own dungeons for weeks. I need to know how this all went down from the outside."

Yamamoto sighed, then calmly began explaining. "Fine. About a month ago, when Varia fell out of contact, all the rest of Vongola got was a short message about a long mission you were about to start. The ninth thought nothing of it, but then… Vongola branches and allies started being attacked, and falling completely. Some new family was taking them down one by one.'

'Then the main branch was attacked. The External Advisor team went to defend the Ninth, and we were sent to find Varia and see if you could be brought to help or if you needed rescuing yourselves.'

'We had six people, including Reborn. Mukuro, Chrome and his gang went missing without a trace just before the attacks started. And Lambo couldn't come because Tsu…" Yamamoto trailed off for a moment, his smile stiff and forced, unable to say the name.

"It was decided he was too young to be brought into such an unknown situation.'

'We arrived and saw your base overrun with enemy soldiers. Reborn figured you would be trapped in lower level dungeons and made a plan to rescue you. Me, Gokudera and Ts… We would attack from the front, both as a diversion and to beat some of their stronger fighters while Hibari, Ryohei and Reborn snuck in from the back entrance and broke you out.'

'It all went wrong. We were distracting pretty well, almost inside the facility, when who I think were lieutenants came out. One of them used guns, a lot of guns, and the other was just insanely strong, fast, a berserker with two knives. It was almost an even fight, and we barely managed to beat them. Then their boss came out.'

'Black flames everywhere. He was using Xanxus's guns to shoot black flame bullets. He was… he was so strong, we couldn't even keep up. Only Tsu… Ts… only…"

Gokudera interrupted his struggling friend's explanation. "Only the Tenth stood a chance against him. They were fighting pretty evenly when… I was too slow, I… oh… I couldn't dodge when he shot at me, my shields were scattered. I thought I was going to die, I heard the shots but then there was a blur in front of my eyes and the Tenth, oh the Tenth, he just went and…"

"He took the bullets," Yamamoto explained. "He caught seven of them in his gloves and took six straight to the chest.'

'We ran, then. We got into the woods and then I stayed behind to try and buy Gokudera enough time to get Ts-Tsu… him to a doctor, or at least away from the fighting.'

Yamamoto smile finally failed as he finished his explanation, his expression harsh, angry, and full of self-loathing. 'I lasted maybe thirty seconds before I felt a needle in my neck and I was sleeping. I woke up here, and he was… Tsuna was dead."

Yamamoto stared at Gokudera, a question in his eyes, until Gokudera responded shakily. "I got the Tenth further away and we hid in the cave where we made base. I tried to do first aid, and then that _bastard_ was there. He knocked me out and...'

'Why the hell didn't he kill me too?"

"He needed you to report the death." Squalo responded. "He needed the Vongola to lose hope."

Squalo started his own explanation then. "We were taken completely by surprise. One moment we were hearing reports of attacks on the outer patrols, the next we were unconscious. I woke up in one of our cells with these three separate from everyone else. We were left there for over a month, seeing no one but silent guards from the enemy. When we got rowdy, they'd run an electric current through the floor. Same for trying to escape, use flames, or any other random reason.'

'When you attacked the power was cut and we were able to escape. We got out and went straight to this secret secondary base. Mammon found you all after the fighting had stopped, just lying there, and we went to retrieve you. There was no body in the cave, just some blood, but Mammon saw the bullet go into his brain before they took the body with them."

"So," Squalo asked, "What do we do now?"

**ARG sorry for the very long break. Hibari will be in the next chapter, I just feel that wall of expository dialogue was enough for you to deal with.**


End file.
